Unconventional
by Alstroemeriae
Summary: She always, always, always cried herself to sleep. He knew, his room was only two walls away and Lily didn't put a silencing charm on her room at night, for obvious safety reasons, because she knew he was a deep sleeper and he had gone to bed before her and he wouldn't hear her. JPLE one-shot.


**Disclaimer: None of the characters in this story are mine. They belong to J.K. Rowling. **

She always, always, always cried herself to sleep. He knew, his room was only two walls away and Lily didn't put a silencing charm on her room at night, for obvious safety reasons, because she knew he was a deep sleeper and he had gone to bed before her and he wouldn't hear her. But he always did because her sobs were so gut-wrenchingly _sad_, and they made him heart clench like he was having a heart attack and he immediately woke up. It was like he was a new mother, wakening when her newborn howled and wept. Except he didn't rise and go to his newborn, because he knew what she needed and he _couldn't _give it to her.

So he just listened while she cried and waited until it ceased so he could sleep and she could sleep.

They weren't friends at the beginning of the year. They argued over head duties and couldn't patrol together like they were supposed to because they always, always, always fought. They'd march in different directions but patrol the same area twice and it was completely inefficient so they didn't patrol together after that. He still teased her brilliance and temper and she still mocked him and his arrogance and asked him when he was finally going to grow up. She spent most of her time at the library, or the lake, or the Gryffindor common room and he spent his time at the quidditch pitch, or his bedroom, or the Gryffindor common room. They didn't use their head common room often. It was usually only the two of them up there and they couldn't be in the same room without arguing so they settled for the public room because if the fight ever got too far, their friends were there and they would be able to control the situation. And that was that.

And then, during a Monday morning Transfiguration class, McGonagall let an owl in the classroom and opened the letter it had attached to its leg. It requested Head Girl, Lily Evans immediate presence in the Headmasters office and Lily looked so confused and so worried but she left her work on her desk in front of him and walked out the door. She didn't return by the end of the class so James was a good Head Boy and carried her bag to the greenhouses for their next class together. And then she didn't show up there either; it was the last class of the day for Gryffindor seventh years so James took her bag to Quidditch practice with him, telling himself that he didn't have time to run up and put it in the head's common room but he really just wanted her to come find him, so he could make sure nothing was out of the ordinary.

But Lily didn't show up the next day, or the week after that.

When she did show up, he'd been so happy; he didn't realize that something was _so, so, so wrong_ and he completely forgot that they weren't friends. He just knew that he had missed her and now she was back and he saw her and that was that.

He failed to notice the blank stare she supported for the rest of the evening. He didn't even grasp that _something was_ _off,_ when she walked past two dueling fifth years in the hallway without a second glance. He subconsciously brushed it off as exhaustion and continued up to the Head's dorm to go to finish his homework and sleep. He got there a little after her and saw her sitting on the maroon couch, staring at her hands in her lap. They exchanged a few words and he went up to his room and laid in his bed and drifted into sleep.

But her sobs awoke him and he swore it was one of the scariest moments in his life. He had jumped out of bed and ran to her staircase but the staircase knew he possessed male anatomy and had thrown him off. He landed next to a crumpled piece of paper and he picked it up and found it peculiar. It was written on notebook paper and ballpoint pen and he read it even though he knew it was addressed to Lily. By the time the letter had ended he felt like crying because it was from some girl named Petunia who, outright refused to let Lily come to _the funeral_, because it was all her fault that they were dead anyways and they wouldn't want a _freak_ at their funeral, even if the freak was their daughter.

He wanted to fly up the staircase, barge into her room and just hold her and tell her he knew what she was going through but _he didn't_. Because his parents were a wealthy couple of pureblood wizards. His father was Head Auror and his mother was one of the main members of a group fighting pureblood extremists called the Order and they were both _alive_.

So he walked back to his room and tried not to cry with her every night after that.

Holidays rolled around and he signed up to go home. When the departure day finally came around, he and his fellow Gryffindors congregated in the common room and waited for McGonagall to lead them to the carriages and he counted and named every single seventh year except for one. And he knew he had to stay so he told Sirius to go and spend Christmas with his family because even if James wasn't going, Sirius was their adopted son. He told him to tell them that he would owl them and explain, but he was unquestionably staying at Hogwarts that year.

That night, when he went up to the common room quite late, he found her lying on her back, on the floor in front of the fire. She was sniffling, and screaming in frustration, and tears were driving themselves down her cheeks like drunk-drivers on the highway. She looked so startled when he entered, but he didn't let her wonder why he was there for long. He just dropped himself in front of her and pulled her into his lap and wrapped his arms around her. She struggled for a little, before stopping to focus wholeheartedly on crying; she threw her arms around his neck and buried her face into the crook between his shoulder and neck. He felt her hot tears tickle the bare skin there, so he rubbed soothing patterns on her back, under her shirt, to distract himself. He let her bite his collar to keep herself from screaming and push her nails into his back to save herself from clawing her own skin; he saw the five, angry, red lines marking her thighs. He didn't try to tell her he understood. He didn't tell her everything would get better soon because who the hell was he too make predictions like that? He just let her cry and cry and cry her heart dry, until her eyes drooped and her sobs turned into shallow huffs, and her body relaxed. He carried her over to the couch like a baby before lying down and draping her body over his, her mouth pressed into the hollow of his neck. Goosebumps sprinkled themselves aggressively across her skin so he blindly reached for the flannel blanket on the back of the sofa and threw it over both of them. It was slightly uncomfortable—James didn't fit well on the couch—and he knew he would have a sore back for the next few days but he didn't care. He didn't want her to wake up in the morning alone.

They were decidedly inseparable after that; Lily leaned on him and James needed to take care of her to keep himself sane. He pulled her out of her depression and the guilt she had from her parent's deaths. She let him. He was strong for her, even when she didn't need a float to keep her from drowning anymore. They were always like that; she still wasn't sure how they had never noticed how abnormally in-sync they were with each other. Lily became herself again, thanks to James. She laughed and smiled and she kissed him a lot and she aced all her NEWT exams and she asked James out to Homesgade because she was tired of waiting for him to ask her. It was rather unorthodox really; they were in love before the first date.

But everyone knew James and Lily were unconventional. Sirius was always grumbling about something like that.

(He always said it with a smile, though, so it was okay.)


End file.
